Broke City

Broke City, the final book in Wendy McGrath’s Santa Rosa trilogy, follows young Christine as she edges into self-awareness in the now-vanished Edmonton neighbourhood of Santa Rosa.

Budding with creativity that her working-class parents do not understand, Christine questions her parents’ fraught relationship, with alcoholism and implicit violence bubbling just under the surface of their marriage. Her insight turns beyond her family to her neighbourhood, nicknamed Packingtown, a community built on meat-packing plants and abattoirs, on death.

Written with tight lyricism, Broke City is a brimming working-class gothic novel that reveals Christine’s deepening knowledge of the adult world around her and of her own complicated place in that world. 

AUTHOR

Wendy McGrath

Wendy McGrath was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in such publications as Descant, Poetry in Motion, and the NeWest Review. Her previous novel, Recurring Fictions, was released through the University of Alberta Press in 2002. Santa Rosa, was published by NeWest Press in April 2011, and its followup, North East, arrived in October 2014. Her next project, a poetry collection by the name of A Revision of Forward, was released in Fall 2015.

Reviews

Praise for Broke City:

“With her now-complete portrait of the artist as a young girl, McGrath proves why she’s a writer to pay attention to.”
~ Jade Colbert, The Globe and Mail

“Wendy McGrath’s Broke City is a story of class and chaos, inheritance and innocence. Exacting. Excellent.”
~ Marcie McCauley, Herizons

“What’s clear is McGrath’s facility with language, for describing perfectly the sensation when understanding is within one’s grasp, close enough to taste on the tongue but somehow not close enough to feel between one’s teeth.”
~ Yutaka Dirks, Alberta Views

“For a reflective and receptive reader, with a predilection for coming-of-age stories, and stories about memory and inheritance and truth and fear and changing landscapes (emotional and geographic), these novels are in-and-out-and-all-around satisfying
~ Buried in Print Blog

“Like Carson McCullers’ A Member of the Wedding, Wendy McGrath evokes the wise, tender, poignant observations of childhood. Compelling and oh so true, Broke City is a ghost story of the heart.”
~ Jacqueline Baker, author of The Broken Hours

“McGrath’s poetic prose shimmers with the all-seeing light of the prairie sun, as she traces the journey of a young girl bravely fighting for her own identity.”
~ Laurence Miall, author of Blind Spot